In
the years immediately following World War II, the Yugoslav leaders regarded
the national problem, which had made interwar Yugoslavia almost
ungovernable, as definitively solved. As Marshal Tito once said during these
years, "the reason that I don't say anything about the national question is
not because with us it is posed in this or that form. No, the national
question with us has been solved and to be precise, solved very well, to the
general satisfaction of all our nationalities. It has been solved in the way
Lenin and Stalin taught us." [1]

The
basis of this optimism was first of all the situation within the Yugoslav
Communist Party (CPY), whose membership contained a significant
representation from each of the Yugoslav nations, and which combined
democratic centralism with the employment of ethnic cadres according to
region and locality. In the underground factional struggles of the

1. Cited in Fritz Hondius, The Yugoslav Community of
Nations (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), p. 182, n. 34. In the preparation of
this essay I have been particularly indebted to Hondius and to Paul Shoup,
Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1968). In addition, I have had the advantage of lengthy
conversations on the national question with Dejan Janča of the Institute of
International Politics and Economics, Belgrade; Bostjan Markić, member of
the Federal Constitutional Commission; Najdan Pasić, editor-in-chief of
Socijalizam; Sergije Pegan, director of the Yugoslav public opinion poll
on the national problem; Latinka Perović, secretary of the Serbian Communist
Party; Eugen Pusić, Professor of Political Science of the University of
Zagreb; and Stanko Žuljić of the Croatian Institute of Economics. Madame
Perović and Professor Pusić were contacted in this country, the others in
Yugoslavia. The visit to Yugoslavia was made possible by a joint grant of
the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research
Council.

398

interwar period, the party had rid itself of the Serbian hegemony which had
characterized the first years of its existence, had established
organizationally separate sub-parties for Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia,
[2] and had confronted the disaster of Axis occupation and
territorial partition as the one organization in the country which possessed
both a clandestine capability and a state-wide structure. In the civil war
which served as counterpoint to the armed struggle against the foreign
occupier, the CPY consequently came to serve as the paladin of a new
Yugoslav nationalism. On the one hand, the Communists defeated in battle the
Chetnik forces under Draža Mihailović, whose purpose was to restore royal
Yugoslavia, with its Serbian dynasty, its Serbian officers' corps, its
Serbian police, and its Serbian bureaucracy. On the other hand, the CPY held
at bay the Croatian nationalist forces of Ante Pavelić, who aimed to
establish an independent Croatia under the sponsorship of a victorious Axis.
Thus the CPY could regard itself as a revolutionary power which embodied
within itself the national aspirations of all the Yugoslav nations, now
synthesized in the dialectically higher form of a Yugoslav national
consciousness. [3]

The
post-war optimism of the Yugoslav leadership with respect to the national
problem was also rooted in the belief that the exacerbation of national
differences had been the result of exploitation by the bourgeosie, and that
therefore the development of a Socialist society would put an end to
national prejudice even among the masses of the population, whatever their
current attitude toward the Communist Party. More specifically, the
leadership held to the view that national differences were a reflection of
regional differences, of the division of the country into advanced and
retarded areas, the retarded having been the victim of exploitation by the
advanced. Rapid industrialization, which was to be accomplished through the
mechanism of Stalinist central planning, would assuredly bring about an
equalization of these differences, which divided the land into a progressive
northwest and a backward southeast. Indeed, the first five-year plan,
1947-1951, was teleological in character, that is, characterized by a
pervasive belief in economic miracles. The parallels of Soviet
industrialization during the first five-year plan (1928-1933) and of the
Chinese Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) come to mind. For Yugoslavia overall,
an industrial growth rate of 38 % per annum was

2. Republican parties were created for Serbia in 1945 and
for Bosnia and Montenegro in 1948-1949.

envisaged; in the case of backward regions, an annual rate of 90% was believed
possible. To assure the less developed republics of equality in educational
and social services, their budgets were heavily subsidized by the federal
government (half the Montenegrin budget was so provided).

Meantime the CPY introduced a federal constitution on Stalinist lines. This
was to serve as a lightning rod for national discontent until the more
fundamental economic measures could take effect. The country was divided
into six republics, of which one, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was established as a
compromise designed to end the competition between Serbia and Croatia for
control of a province which was inhabited by Serbs, by Croats, and by
Serbo-Croatian-speaking Moslems. The region of Kosovo-Metohija, inhabited
preponderantly by Shiptars,
[4] was given the status of an autonomous oblast within the
Serbian Republic, whereas the Vojvodina, an ethnically very mixed area with
a bare majority of Serbs, was organized as a Serbian autonomous province.
Roughly two-thirds of all minorities were inhabitants of these two
districts. Constitutional forms to the contrary notwithstanding, however,
the situation of the non-Slavic minorities was not a very happy one in the
early post-war years. The German minority in Slovenia, Croatia, and the
Vojvodina vanished completely, either as a consequence of withdrawal under
the protection of the retreating Axis forces, or as a result of emigration
under pressure after the Communists came to power. A Shiptar rebellion
erupted in December, 1944, and aimed at the union of Kosovo with Albania; it
required some six months of counter-insurgent activity. At the apex of the
entire constitutional structure stood a federal parliament composed of an
upper house based on national representation, and a lower house based on
population. There was the usual set of all-union, union-republic, and
republic ministries.

Not
only did the Yugoslav leaders believe they had solved once and for all the
national problem within the frontiers which they had inherited from the
Karageorgević kings, but they also proposed to expand the new Federation to
include the only South Slavic population not comprehended within these
frontiers, namely, the Bulgarian, and in addition, if possible, certain
non-Slavic populations as well. The idea of Balkan federation

4. With the elevation of Kosovo to the status of a
Socialist Autonomous Province in 1968, the official term for its majority
population was changed from Shiptar to Albanian. For the sake of convenience
only, the word Shiptar will be used in this presentation to designate the
Albanian population of Yugoslavia, and the word Albanian, the population
under the jurisdiction of Tirana. Simiraly, the word magyar will be used to
denote the minority in the Vojvodina, the Hungarian population of the
sovereign state.

400

was,
of course, by no means new to Balkan Marxists. The notion had been dear to
the Socialists long before the outbreak, of World War I, while in the
interwar period a special section of the Comintern, dominated by the
powerful Bulgarian party, had sought its realization at the expense of such
states as Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Now that the Yugoslav party was
in charge of the operation, the Bulgarians had second thoughts. One of the
key issues involved in the Bulgarian-Yugoslav negotiations concerning
federation was the disposition of Macedonia, much of which was already
organized as a Yugoslav republic, but on territory to which the Bulgarians
had long-standing claims. The solution agreed upon was the union of
Bulgarian and some part of Greek Macedonia with Yugoslav Macedonia in a
unified Macedonian Republic, which would become a constituent element of the
larger federation. The outstanding weakness of this proposal was that the
Greek party, unlike its northern confreres, was not in power. Thus the
Yugoslavs, aided and abetted by the Bulgarians, gave extensive encouragement
and support to a new period of Greek Communist insurgency, from 1946 to
1949, with the object of replacing the royal with a Communist government and
paving the way for the enlargement of the Federation. The Albanian
Communists were also involved. The Yugoslav party had played a key role both
in the organization of the Albanian party and in the supply and support of
Communist Albanian resistance to Axis occupation. Albania was also being
prepared for membership in the expanded Federation. The ambitious schemes of
the Yugoslav leadership came to naught, as is well known, partly because of
United States intervention in the Greek affair and partly because of the
excommunication of the CPY by the Cominform and the subsequent economic
blockade of Yugoslavia and the build-up of propaganda and military pressure
against her.

The
excommunication of 28 June 1948, was a turning point in the history of the
national problem in Yugoslavia. It meant the postponement ad infinitum
of Balkan federation, thus limiting this Communist experiment to the
traditional Yugoslav populations and thereby increasing its chances of
success. Furthermore, excommunication inevitably meant a whole new way of
governing for the CPY, and a new kind of relationship between regime and
population, since the Communists now had to make their own way in the world,
without any support from the Bloc, and indeed in the face of its avowed
enmity. In his campaign against Yugoslavia, Stalin did attempt to exploit
the national question, particularly with respect to the Macedonian issue.
But the Cominform appeal

401

had
little impact among the Yugoslav nations, with the possible exception of
Montenegrin party members, among whom the percentage of pro-Cominform
defections was the highest. Generally speaking, the Yugoslav nations,
whether we speak of their Communist or their anti-Communist elements,
appeared strongly to approve and endorse the independent stand of Marshal
Tito with respect to Soviet Russia. The Shiptar and Magyar minorities were
suspect because of the inimical activities of Tirana and Budapest, and these
minorities were subjected to various repressive measures. But the security
police made widespread arrests only among the White Russian emigrant colony,
and the unity displayed by all the populations of Yugoslavia in the face of
heavy Cominform pressure amounted to a major political victory for the CPY.

The
decade 1951-1960 witnessed an attempt to create a Yugoslav national
consciousness among the masses of the population. As a consequence of
experience with the first five-year-plan it became evident to the Communist
elite that the regional differences which they believed to underly national
hostility were not so easily overcome as at first supposed. Much of the
industrial growth achieved during the era of teleological planning was
artificial. Indeed, industries were created which required permanent
subsidization. Despite the allocation of huge sums to the backward south,
the most rapid and meaningful progress was made in the north. The gap
between the two areas was hardly narrowed, except that the persistence of
budgetary subsidies gave life throughout the Federation the appearance of a
drab uniformity. If national differences would not soon disappear as the
consequence of economic advance, it seemed necessary to promote a Yugoslav
nationalism by more direct means.

The
purpose of replicating within the masses the integral national consciousness
which prevailed within the Party was made more relevant by the economic
reform of 1951. The motives of the reform were to be found outside the
national field. They were in part ideological, i.e., to demonstrate that it
was the Soviets who were heretical, not the Yugoslavs, for among the latter
the state had already begun to wither away, whereas among the former it was
more bureaucratic and relied more heavily on the police power than ever
before. The economic reform was also intended to broaden widely the base of
support which the regime enjoyed

402

among
the population, it being too risky in the circumstance of excommunication to
continue the very leftist policies of the early post-war years. The key
characteristic of the economic reform was decentralization. Substantial
authority for the implementation of the perspective plan of 1952-1961 was
transferred from the center at Belgrade to the party cadres at the level of
the republic, the commune, and the enterprise. Agriculture was
decollectivized, the only instance of its kind in the history of world
Communism. The security police were much less in evidence and the use of
administrative measures fell off sharply. In these circumstances it was
necessary for all the regions and all the peoples to move forward together.
The motivation for compliance with regime dictates was in part to be
supplied by the new Yugoslav national consciousness. [5]

Paradoxically, the policy of promoting Yugoslavism was reinforced by the death
of Stalin and the end of Cominform pressure. These events terminated what
had been a severe external threat, and thus reduced the need for cooperation
among the peoples of the Federation. To be sure, pressure did not disappear.
In the south relations with both Bulgaria and Albania continued to be
strained. In 1955-1956 the Yugoslav security police believed it necessary to
undertake a collection of privately-held weapons in the Kosovo, and this
turned out to be a bloody affair. In the Macedonian republic, on the other
hand, the situation appeared to improve. The new literary language, based on
a dialect spoken in the extreme southwest of the Republic, and thus as far
removed from both Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian as possible, became the
general mode of written expression by the middle 'fifties. The foundations
of a separate Macedonian Orthodox Church were laid with the establishment in
1958 of an autonomous archbishopric at Ohrid, also in the extreme southwest.
The representation of Macedonia in the central organs of government was
likewise enhanced, as was the flow of investment subsidy. But, generally
speaking, relations with the East were much improved after Stalin's
disappearance from the political stage, and it is noteworthy that in the
very year of his death there occurred the first instances of ethnic conflict
in the post-war history of the country. The economic reform, moreover, paved
the way for much particularism and provincialism. Authority had been moved
from the center to the periphery, most of it into the hands of local party
cadres. Every locality appeared determined to have its factory, regardless
of economic feasi-

bility, and each republic seemed inclined to have its
own steel mill, electronics industry and port facility. For all these
additional reasons, then, Yugoslav nationalism appeared to the leadership to
be the order of the day.

The
first major expression of the new national policy was the Constitutional Act
of 1953 which, although in form an amendment of the Constitution of 1946,
was in fact a new organic law. The Act of 1953 was intended to de-emphasize
the federal system. The set of all-union and union-republic ministries was
abolished and replaced with a unitary federal bureaucracy. The sweeping
promises of the 1946 Constitution with respect to the rights of the
republics were eliminated. The Chamber of Nationalities, which had served as
the upper house in the first constitution, was merged with the lower house,
or National Assembly. Henceforth each republican parliament would elect ten
delegates, and each provincial assembly five, who would sit in the National
Assembly alongside the popularly elected deputies. If an issue arose which
concerned the rights of the republics, the delegates could assemble
separately, and their consent would be necessary for the legislation at
hand. But as a matter of fact, the Chamber of Nationalities never did
convene as long as the Act of 1953 was in force. A new second house was
provided in the form of a Council of Producers ; this was syndical in
character.

Throughout the period 1951-1960 the leadership waged a campaign against what
it chose to call "cultural isolation". Since there were no central cultural
or academic organizations, no Yugoslav academy of sciences, no Yugoslav
ballet, a federal unit was formed to 'coordinate' the activity of the
various republican cultural institutes. A program of cultural exchange
between the republics was worked out, pressure put on republican ministries
of education to produce and utilize common textbooks, and newspapers
encouraged to devote more space to the happenings in other parts of the
country. In minority areas cultural organizations were integrated with those
of the dominant Slavic population. Thus, for all of Vojvodina there was one
set of cultural institutions, with sub-sections for Hungarian speakers,
Romanian speakers, Slovak speakers, and the like. In mixed areas such
integration was also true for the schools of the minorities. They were
merged with those of the dominant population, and although some subjects
continued to be taught in the minority language, the minority children also
had classes in common with Serbo-Croatian speakers.
[6] This policy was comple-

6. This policy did not apply to the Italians, who were
protected by international treaty.

404

mented by the granting of permission to the surviving
Jews, and, after Yugoslavia and Turkey became allies in the Balkan Pact of
1963, to the Turks, to emigrate. The vast majority of the Jews took
advantage of this permission, and the exodus of Turks was large enough to
embarrass the Macedonian authorities. Some 50,000 Shiptars also emigrated to
Turkey. Approximately 25,000 Italians returned to the Italian motherland.

The
culmination of the campaign against cultural isolation was reached in 1954,
when representatives of the Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins met in Novi Sad,
capital of Vojvodina and traditional seat of Serb learning, to announce that
the three peoples employed an identical language (a substantially factual
statement) and that a commission would set to work on a common dictionary.
[7] From time to time the regime raised the possibility of
the ultimate merger of all the Yugoslav cultures into an integral whole,
although always entering a disclaimer to the effect that such integration
naturally presupposed the flowering of the individual cultures.

The
principal ideologue of the new national policy was the Slovene E. Kardelj.
In 1958 he undertook to revise the traditional Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist
position on the national question by arguing in various publications that
the nation played a positive role regardless of the form assumed by the
state. In other words, the nation was a vital feature of both the capitalist
and the Socialist stages of development, and the erosive impact of
revolutionary upheaval on national consciousness was much less than had been
believed. The continuity of national development was relatively unaffected
by revolutionary changes in the nature of class relations. But the nation
Kardelj had in mind was not the Slovene but the Yugoslav. The republics did
not perform any progressive economic function, he asserted, and the fact
that they had cultures of their own did not make them national entities.
Regionalism and particularism were reactionary forces. Among Communists it
was generally believed that Bosnia, with its mosaic of Serbo-Croatian
speakers of Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem faith, would serve as a melting
pot and provide, on a mass basis, the first example of the new Yugoslav
national consciousness. Said the Party program adopted at the seventh
congress in 1958: the future of national relations lies in the development
of

7. An exemplary discussion of the language issue in
Yugoslavia is to be found in Michael B. Petrovich, "Nationalism and
Communism in Yugoslavia", an unpublished typescript of 92 pages. A short
version of the common dictionary was published in 1960, together with the
first volume of the longer work.

405

Socialist relations and as a Socialist community of peoples develops there
will emerge a Yugoslav national consciousness.

The
current period is characterized by abandonment of the policy of Yugoslav
nationalism and the emergence of a genuine federalism.

As
has already been suggested, the decentralization brought about by the
economic reform of 1951 gave rise to autarkic forces. With the passage of
time these gathered strength. By 1965 there were five steel mills with a
combined production of 2.2 million tons, although the break-even point for a
single mill was two million tons. There were a half-dozen automotive
manufacturing or assembly plants, total production being on the order of
50,000 units.
[8] Railway administration had been republicanized so that
there were different sets of tariffs and even different signal systems.
Markets were sometimes fenced off by administrative measures; firms based in
other republics were not permitted to open local outlets or establish
manufacturing subsidiaries. Perhaps most significant of all was the port
situation. Interwar Yugoslavia had developed Rijeka, on the Adriatic coast,
as its principal harbor. Rijeka, however, was located on the territory of
the Croatian Republic, as was indeed 90% of the Adriatic coast. The Slovenes
began building a port at Koper, on their ten miles of Adriatic shore.
Landlocked Bosnia supported the construction of a port at Ploče, near the
mouth of the Neretva river close to the tongue of its territory which
touched the sea. Serbia and Montenegro together proposed to develop Bar, on
the territory of Montenegro, although the rail line from Belgrade to Bar had
to be built through 200 miles of some of the most difficult mountains in
Europe. Such duplication of expensive port facilities was uneconomical for a
country short of capital resources.

But
that was not all. At least the Adriatic ports provided Yugoslavia with cheap
transportation to the world market. And most of Yugoslavia's bauxite and
water power were located in the mountain ranges which towered over the
Adriatic coast. This same region was also the center of the

increasingly important tourist trade, so that the infra-structure developed
here would serve many purposes. Yet development of the Adriatic coast would
benefit Croatia more than any other republic and, at the same time, would
tend to give the Federation a markedly Western orientation. Consequently,
Serbia pushed the development of a set of ports along the Danube river, at
Novi Sad, Zemun, Belgrade, Smederova, all of them Serbian towns looking down
the Danube to the Black Sea and the East. One of the purposes of the joint
Romanian-Yugoslav Iron Gates project was to raise the maximum tonnage of
barges passing through the locks from 1500 to 2000. The commercial future of
the Danube is not bright. Thus competition in port facilities was also an
expression of the traditional rivalry between Croatia and Serbia, and had
foreign policy overtones. Overall, the rivalry for investment funds, aside
from being wasteful, exacerbated national antagonisms and raised the
potential for conflict.

One
feature of the new economic nationalism was the increasing unwillingness of
the northern, more advanced, republics, to continue subsidizing the economic
growth of their southern fellows. The northerners argued that to do so was
to waste scarce resources. Most of the factories built in the south could be
kept in operation only with further subsidies. Even the advantage of a
cheap, unskilled labor force was negated by the existence of workers'
councils, which insisted on forcing wages up to the northern level. Dinar
for dinar, most investment gave a much better return in the north, which
possessed most of the skilled labor, the high density transportation net,
proximity to important foreign markets, and so on. [9] The
northerners began to advocate a second economic reform, one which would take
investment out of the hands of the party apparatus and the state
bureaucracy, at whatever level, and leave it to be ruled by the free play of
market forces.

The
south made the traditional appeal to social justice. The investment monies
coming from the north were only its proper due ; they represented the
surplus value which northern industry had got by its exploitation of
southern agriculture and southern raw materials. Proof of this charge was to
be found in the discrepancy between the prices of manufactures, which tended
constantly to creep up, and the prices of agricultural commodities and other
raw materials, which tended to decline. Any infant industry needed
protection in one form or another. If the subsidies from

9. For a good illustration of the weakness of such
southern industry see Jack C. Fisher, Yugoslavia: a Multinational State,
Regional Difference and Administrative Response (San Francisco: Chandler
Publishing Company, 1966), p. 11.

407

the
north were discontinued, the southerners would be condemned to remain
forever hewers of wood and drawers of water. The south therefore advocated
retention of the economic and political status quo. [10]

The
opposition to a new economic reform was led by Aleksandar Ranković, Tito's
official heir apparent. Aside from being party secretary in charge of
cadres, Ranković was de facto boss of both the Serbian party and the
federal security police; through the latter he exercised considerable
control over the diplomatic service. Indeed, the security service was the
one federal agency still dominated by the Serbs. It would, of course, be
inaccurate to suggest that all Serbs were supporters of Ranković. On key
issues the conservative leader could control neither the Serbian central
committee nor the Serbian parliament, for both these bodies included strong
representation of managerial and professional groups. But the most important
element in the Ranković following was ethnically Serb, and the Serbs in the
apparatus and the police who followed him were mainly former Partisans who
had come originally from such backward areas as Bosnia or the Lika region in
Croatia. Often semi-literate mountaineers, they felt threatened by the
emergence of new elite elements who had been born too late to serve in the
war but who had acquired professional education they themselves lacked.
Until very late in the game Ranković also had the support of the southern
republics.

In
1965 the revisionist forces proved strong enough to put through legislation
which called for the marketization of the economy. Ranković used the party
apparatus and, above all, the security police to sabotage the implementation
of the new legislation. A year of heavy factional in-fighting ended in July
1966 with the removal of Ranković and his principal lieutenants from public
life, the downgrading of the security police, which was not only
deserbianized but split into two separate organizations, and the pensioning
of large numbers of Partisan veterans.

The
decision in favor of marketization was ultimately Marshal Tito's. No doubt
his choice was influenced by a variety of factors, but two stand out.

The
economic reform of 1951 had given rise to an economic nationalism which
threatened not only the efficiency of the economy but also the unity of the
state. By shifting economic decision-making from a decentralized political
system to the economy itself, the republics and the localities would lose
much of their ability to interfere with the allocation

10. For an account of current national attitudes toward
the economic reform see Paul Lendvai, Eagles in Cobwebs: Nationalism and
Communism in the Balkans (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company,
1969), pp. 140-148.

408

of
investment. The leadership was thus brought to a third version of its basic
belief, i.e., that economic improvement would solve the national problem. In
the period of the first five-year plan they had believed that rapid
industrialization would reduce the disparity between regional living
standards and thus erode national antagonism. In the 'fifties they had held
the view that, in the long run, industrialization, reinforced by the
development of Socialist relations would reduce divergencies of language and
culture to secondary importance; meantime they sought to hasten this
millennium by promoting an official Yugoslav nationalism. Now, in 1966,
after two failures, they would try what came to be called the Socialist
market.

But
in addition to considerations of state unity, factors of state sovereignty
were also involved in the decision to remove Ranković. In the early days of
forced industrialization the Yugoslavs had imported the fuels and the raw
materials they did not possess at home from the Soviet Union and had paid
for these imports with shipments of their newly manufactured wares. Prior to
the Cominform excommunication about 75 % of Yugoslavia's total foreign trade
was exchanged with the Socialist countries. Excommunication was, however,
followed by blockade, and the Yugoslavs quickly discovered that most of the
items they now manufactured could not be sold in Western markets at
competitive prices. Belgrade thereupon hit on the idea of a grouping of
non-aligned, developing nations, a grouping which would not only serve the
political purpose of bolstering Yugoslav neutrality in the cold war, but in
addition could be made to serve as a source of raw materials and a market
for (second-class) manufactured wares. To cultivate these markets Belgrade
extended generous long-term credits to various African and Asian
governments, as well as sending them numbers of technicians and planners.
Unfortunately, by the 1960's it had become evident that the developing
countries were interested in exchanging their raw materials for Yugoslav
manufactures only as long as the exchange was subsidized by Yugoslav credits
granted on favorable terms. Since relations with the European Socialist
countries had meanwhile improved substantially, one solution to the Yugoslav
problem would have been to apply for full membership in Comecon, the trading
organization of the Socialist states. This would re-establish the basic
relationship of 1945-1948, i.e., the barter of Yugoslav manufactures for
Soviet raw materials. Such a return to the Socialist fold would make it
possible, even necessary, to retain the system of central planning (which
was one reason the Ranković forces were pro-Soviet). But the Comecon
solution carried with it also the probability of economic

409

dependence on the USSR and therefore the risk of some degree of political
dependence as well. To preserve the country's independence the Yugoslav
leadership had accepted in 1948 the not inconsiderable dangers of
excommunication.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to trade equally with both East and West.
Trade with Comecon countries was barter trade, carried on primarily for
political reasons. The Socialist markets were so hungry for manufactured
wares of any kind that they would swallow almost anything the Yugoslavs
produced, without much regard to quality of servicing. Barter trade with
Comecon to any great extent, therefore, would perpetuate the inefficiency of
Yugoslav industry relative to that in the West, and end by limiting trade
with the West to the sale of enough Yugoslav manufactures at
below-production cost to procure requisite quantities of hard currency. If
Yugoslavia wished to preserve her hard-won independence â la longue,
she would have to carry on the bulk of her foreign trade with the capitalist
West, and to do this she would have to increase the efficiency of her
manufacturing establishment to such a point that her wares were competitive
in the West. Hence political as well as economic considerations motivated
Marshal Tito's decision to proceed with the second economic reform, even at
the cost of downgrading the Serbs and appearing to abandon the southern
republics. [11]

As
far as the national problem is concerned, Marshal Tito's decision only
hastened a process which by 1966 was already far advanced: the decline of
Yugoslav national consciousness within the CPY itself and the gradual
replacement of a single, nationally integral party with a set of six
organically related but nationally distinct parties which carried on the
business of the country by negotiating with each other. The beginning of
this process may be traced to the year 1959, when the central committee of
the CPY ceased reaching its decisions by unanimous vote. [12]
This was the first public sign that a process of national differentiation
had begun within the Party itself. In March 1962, a plenum of the central
committee was for the first time rent by national antagonism. The Ranković
forces, though in the minority on the question of reform, refused to make
any concessions whatever to the majority. The Politburo, in a subsequent

11. For a discussion of the relationship of economic
reform and sovereignty see Alvin Z. Rubenstein, "Yugoslavia: Reforms,
Non-Alignment and Pluralism", Problems of Communism, (March-April
1968), pp. 31-41.

circular letter to Party organizations, in effect admitted it could no longer
be certain that its directives would be executed. The Eighth Party Congress,
in 1964, formally rejected the notion of a Yugoslav nationalism as harmful
and adopted a new party statute which stipulated that, in the future,
republican would PRECEDE rather than follow federal party congresses. The
new procedure was actually carried out in the convening of the ninth
congress in March, 1969. That congress adopted the principle of equality,
i.e., that all republics were to be equally represented in all federal
institutions, whether those of the state or those of the party, and both
provinces equally but with smaller delegations than those of the republics.
Thus the new executive bureau, created at the ninth congress, in addition to
President Tito, was composed of two Slovenes, two Croats, two Montenegrins,
two Macedonians, four Serbs (two representing Serbia and one each Bosnia and
the Vojvodina), one Moslem, representing Bosnia, and a Shiptar from Kosovo.
Neither Moslems nor Shiptars had appeared at this level before.
[13] Thus the higher organs of the Party became deliberative bodies in
which delegations of the various republics and provinces met each other on
equal footing. Nothing quite like this arrangement has been seen in any
other Communist party.

The
changing character of the Party was, to be sure, reflected in the evolution
of Yugoslav constitutional law. A new constitution, adopted in 1963, was in
part an attempt by the reformers to democratize the system so as to weaken
the Ranković forces. But the 1963 constitution also marked the formal
proclamation of a new concept of federation. Yugoslavia was described as a
community of nations. Member nations could withdraw. Non-member peoples
could apply for admission. "In pledging itself to comprehensive political,
economic and cultural cooperation with other peoples and states, Yugoslavia,
as a Socialist community of nations, holds that this cooperation should
contribute to the creation of new democratic forms of associations between
states, nations, and peoples, which will correspond to the interest of the
nations and social progress, and in this respect it is an open community."
[14]
Just as the constitution of 1946 had been an imitation of the Soviet model, so
the constitution of 1963 borrowed heavily from the organic law of the United
States. The 1963 document did not pretend to regulate the internal

affairs of the constituent republics. Instead, each of the republics adopted
its own constitution, independently of the Federation. Each of the
republics, as well as the Federation, created a constitutional court, as
distinct from already existing supreme courts, which would rule on the
constitutionality of legislation and protect the rights of individuals.

The
Constitution of 1963 created a pentecameral parliament, with four chambers
representing various professional groupings and elected indirectly, and one,
the federal chamber, chosen directly on the basis of single-member
constituencies. The membership of the federal chamber was reinforced by
delegations elected by the republic and provincial chambers; these
delegations, which were supposed to meet as a separate house whenever
matters affecting the equality of the republics came up, were a continuation
of the chamber of nationalities. In fact, however, the delegations rarely
met as a separate house. After the removal of Ranković, however, a series of
constitutional amendments, in May, 1967, and December, 1968, greatly
enlarged the role of the chamber of nationalities. The federal chamber was
abolished and replaced with a new social political chamber, elected
federation-wide on the same basis of single-member constituencies. In order
not to make the legislature hexicameral, the political organizational
chamber was dropped altogether, leaving three syndical bodies, the chambers
of health, culture and economics. Meantime, the chamber of nationalities was
given a wholly separate existence and its membership enlarged from 70 to 140
delegates. Virtually the entire jurisdiction of the former federal chamber
was now vested in the social political and nationalities' chambers jointly:
the basic rights of citizens, foreign policy and national defense, state
security, domestic policy, the federal budget, and the appointment and
dismissal of the government. On all these matters the two chambers sit
jointly. Aside from having exclusive responsibility for the rights of the
nations, nationalities, republics and provinces, the chamber of
nationalities also has the final say on the budget, in the sense that if
none of the other chambers can agree on the budget, then the version of it
adopted by the chamber of nationalities becomes law. Constitutional
amendments can be adopted by the chamber of nationalities and two of the
remaining houses, but the change is officially proclaimed by the chamber of
nationalities.[15]
In 1967 simultaneous translation was installed in the assembly

15. For the text of the 1968 amendments see JPRS,
Translations on Eastern Europe: PoliticalSociological, and Military Affairs,
No. 47,697, (21 March 1969), pp. 175-185. In the matter of amendments one of
the two additional chambers must be that normally vested with jurisdiction
in the question at hand. See Hondius, pp. 329-332 for the amendments.

412

rooms
of the Yugoslav parliament, and thereafter each delegate spoke in his own
language rather than in Serbo-Croatian. The only other parliamentary body in
Europe to pursue a similar practice is the Swiss.

The
reorganization of the central government was accompanied by an expansion of
the rights and responsibilities of the republics. They were responsible for
the execution of federal law within their territories. They had their own
prosecutors and they shared with Belgrade control of a much-reduced security
police. They also shared responsibility with the federal government for
civil defense, and after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia each was
authorized to recruit and train a militia which, in time of war, would come
under the command of the federal military. [16] The
republics even came to have an institutionalized influence in foreign
policy. Each organized a committee for international relations as well as a
commission for foreign cultural relations. These committees and commissions
brought the republic's point of view to bear on the foreign office in
Belgrade and saw to it that their fellow-nationals were properly represented
in the federal foreign service. It is not uncommon for republican officials
to participate in negotiations between Yugoslavia and a foreign power when
the interests of the republic are directly concerned, and the federal
government mediates between the republic and such international institutions
as the Bank for International Reconstruction and Development. Republican
authorities are encouraged to entertain relations with their counterparts
across the Yugoslav frontier, and the republics are responsible for the
social security status of those who go abroad in search of employment.
[17]

The
shift from official Yugoslav nationalism to the conception of the Federation
as a community of nations placed the Moslem population of Bosnia, some one
million strong, in a new light. This population spoke Serbo-Croatian, but
its literature was partly in Arabic, and under the Ottoman imperium it had
regarded itself as Turkish, partly because of the Ottoman practice of
identifying religion, law and nationality, and partly because the Bosnian
Moslems were a land-owning class lording it over a semi-serf population of
Serbian and Croatian peasants. In the interwar period, when Bosnia was
joined with a variety of other provinces

16. Twenty per cent of all army recuits are to carry out
their military duty in their own republics, in contrast to the policy of the
'fifties, when a deliberate effort was made to have each recruit serve in
another republic than his own.

to
form the Yugoslav state, some of the Moslems had chosen to emigrate to
Turkey. During World War II they had at first heeded the exhortations of the
supreme mufti of Jerusalem and given their support to independent Croatia
and to the Axis forces generally. A Moslem SS division was organized. As
prospects for Axis victory grew dim, some of the Bosnian Moslems entered the
ranks of the Partisans, but the bulk of them remained hostile to Communism,
as the first post-war elections within the Moslem religious community
demonstrated. Under Communism their sheriat courts were abolished (1946) and
their women unveiled (1950-1951). In the 1948 census they were given the
choice of registering as Serbs, Croats or Yugoslavs, the official view being
that they constituted a religious and not an ethnic minority. In the
'fifties, of course, they were treated as Yugoslavs and it was assumed that
the new Yugoslav nationalism would find its earliest expression in Bosnia
with the merger of the three Serbo-Croatian-speaking populations. In the
census of 1961, however, the Moslems were recognized for the first time as
an ethnic group, a status accorded them more formally by the Bosnian
constitution of 1963. The Fourth Bosnian Party congress, meeting in 1964,
declared that the Moslems possessed the right of self-determination. Still
another South Slav nation was coming into being. (Incidentally, in 1967, the
Macedonian Archbishopric declared itself autocephalous, i.e., independent of
the Serbian patriarchate. In the Orthodox world, the formation of a separate
church has long been the hallmark of national independence. The Serbian and
Greek churches promptly declared the new body schismatic, while the
Patriarchate of Constantinope refused to recognize it. The Macedonian church
remains an outcast in the Orthodox communion.) [18]

The
abandonment of Yugoslav nationalism and the conversion of the republic into
a genuine federation were accompanied by an improvement in the standing of
the minorities. As early as 1959 the term "minority" was officially
abandoned as prejudicial, and replaced with the word "nationality". In areas
where integrated schools existed, students of national origin, e.g., Serbs,
were required to study the language of the local nationality, e.g., Magyar.
[19] A dual language administration was introduced in the
Hungarian-speaking area, and efforts were made to

18. "Serbian Church Rift Deplored by Greeks", The New
York Times
(14 September 1967), p. 45, col. 1.

19. With respect to education, most complaints concerned
members of the nations rather than representatives of the nationalities. It
was the policy of each republic not to provide for instruction in the
languages of the other nations, no doubt on the ground that the educational
interests of each nation was looked after by its republic. Thus there was
little provision for instruction in Macedonian in Serbian schools, or on the
other hand, were looked after by the appropriate republics, principally
Serbia, but overall general compliance with the dominant republican language
and way of life became the rule.

414

improve bilingualism in Kosovo. More important still, the nationalities,
instead of being regarded as potential sources of dissidence and conflict,
were now to be thought of as bridges of communication with Yugoslavia's
neighbors. The half-million Magyars of the Vojvodina, for example, were to
serve as a conduit to Hungary. To this end the local frontier was opened,
each side establishing retail outlets on the territory of the other. With
the removal of Ranković the security forces in Kosovo were handed over to
Shiptar cadres, much to the apprehension of the Serbian minority in that
province. The Shiptars were permitted to celebrate the 500th anniversary of
the death of Skanderbeg and to fly the Albanian national flag. The
propaganda war between Radio Prizren and Radio Tirana became less bitter.
The frontier with Albania, for years closed to all traffic except that of
espionage agents, was opened to a limited tourist trade, permitting Kosovars
at long last to visit relatives and friends in Albania. [20]
There was some improvement in the situation along the Bulgarian frontier
also, but cultural exchange between Skopje and Sofia was fitful, frequently
running afoul of the Bulgarian contention that no such language as
Macedonian existed, that Macedonian national heroes were in fact Bulgarian,
and the like. [21]
Belgrade also managed to open the frontier to the Slavophone population of
Greek Macedonia, but it was twice closed by Athens. [22]

Improvement in the status of minorities inevitably led to an upgrading of
provincial government, a change precipitated by a series of student
demonstrations which began at the bilingual Pristina campus of the
University of Belgrade in October 1968. The demonstrations, which spread to
various other localities in the province, were repeated in November, in
December spread to the Shiptar minority in the Macedonian Republic, and in
most cases degenerated into riots. The principal demand of the demonstrators
was that republican status be granted to

20. L[uigi] Z[angaJ, "Kosovo-Metohija: a Nationality Case
Study", RFE Research: Communist Area (30 October 1967), 8 pp. Only
13% of security officials in Kosovo were Shiptars prior to the removal of
Ranković. By 1968 the percentage was over 40. Petrovich, p. 60 and p. 61, n.
58.

Kosovo, and that the boundaries of the new federated republic be extended to
include the Shiptar minority in Macedonia, which comprises a compact mass of
200,000 persons adjacent to the Albanian frontier. [23]
Whether one speaks of autonomy, or educational facilities, or publications,
the Shiptars of Macedonia were by no means as well off as their brothers in
Kosovo. The demand for a Kosovar Republic put the Yugoslav leaders in a very
difficult position. On the one hand they did not wish to risk their good
relations with the Macedonians, nor provide an excuse for the revival of
Bulgarian territorial claims. On the other, republican status could not be
granted to Kosovo and withheld from the Vojvodina, but to make both
concessions would surely appear to the Serbs as the partition of Serbia.

The
outcome was a compromise arrangement, in which the boundaries of Kosovo
remained unchanged, the title of republic withheld, but the substance of
republican standing accorded. These changes were also embodied in the
constitutional amendments of December 1968. The adjective "Socialist" was
added to the provincial title. The competencies and functions of the
provincial governments were no longer derived from the Serbian republic but
were original and were set forth in separate provincial constitutions, which
replaced earlier statutes. The execution of federal law within the province
was now the responsibility of Priština and Novi Sad, whose parliaments had
the same legislative authority as those of the republics, except in matters
affecting Serbia as a whole. The provinces henceforth had their own supreme
courts and public prosecutors and, if ever the constitution of the Serbian
Republic should be amended to permit it, these supreme courts could assume
constitutional functions. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re![24]

The
material presented in the foregoing pages lends itself to the formulation of
contradictory hypotheses. One may point to the failure of the Yugoslav
peoples to develop a Yugoslav national consciousness, despite the systematic
efforts of the Communist Party, and to the continuing devolution of
authority to lower instances, and particularly to the repub-

lics,
as greatly increasing the possibility that the Federation will break up in
the course of some future crisis and will in the meantime suffer from
intensification of domestic quarrels. [25] Or one can
argue, on the contrary, that Yugoslavia is developing a truly multi-national
state which will make it possible for the nations and the nationalities of
the country to work out their differences peacefully, and which in the long
run will be mutually advantageous enough to cause these diverse peoples to
stand united in time of crisis. Let us attempt briefly to summarize some of
the arguments which support each of these hypotheses, beginning with the
pessimistic one.

As a
consequence of ending Serbian hegemony within its own ranks and then of
fighting for the Yugoslav idea in a bloody civil war, the CPY came to be the
paladin of a Yugoslav national consciousness. But the efforts of the Party
to propagate this consciousness among the population at large were a
miserable failure, and even the Party itself broke up into its component
national and republican units. Thus, after some 20 years of Communist rule,
the national problem re-emerged. The failure of the Party was due not only
to the stubbornness of traditional national sentiment but, more
particularly, to the identification of national with economic differences,
so that the interests of, for example, the Slovenes ran contrary to the
interests of, say, the Macedonians, on so fundamental an issue as investment
priorities. In a very real sense, therefore, the communist rulers now find
themselves face to face with the very problem which wrecked royal
Yugoslavia.

The
fact that the national situation has not got out of hand so far is due in
very considerable part to the political virtuosity, not to mention the
charisma, of Josip Broz Tito. He alone had enough prestige and skill to
persuade the Serbs, representing 43 % of the population, to accept the
disgrace and dissolution of the Ranković faction, and the pensioning off of
thousands of Partisan heroes. There is at present no apparent successor to
the Marshal: both within and without Yugoslavia there is virtual unanimity
that Kardelj could only serve as a transition figure. The Marshal's
departure from the political scene may well lead to either a breakdown of
law and order or a breakup of the Federation. There are elements in the
country which are already pushing the current evolution in the direction of
confederation. At any rate, the unilateral repudiation of the Novi Sad
agreement in 1967 by the principal cultural institutions

25. More or less typical of this first view is Victor
Zorza, "The Yugoslav Situation : Unstable, Confused", The Sunday Star
(Washington, D.C.), (7 September 1969), p. E4.

417

of
Croatia set off a heated dispute between Serbs and Croats, the last of which
has not been heard. [26]

Of
all the sub-problems which, together, make up the Yugoslav national problem,
perhaps the thorniest is that of the Shiptars. Numbering all told over a
million souls, the Shiptars not only constitute the single largest
non-Slavic minority in the Federation, but they are numerically far more
important than the Montenegrins and roughly of equal strength with both the
Macedonians and the Moslems. The Shiptars have the lowest living standard of
any Yugoslav population (just over $200 per capita per annum as compared
with a Federal average above $500). They have the densest population (104
inhabitants per square mile as against a federal average of 73), the highest
rate of population increase (28.5 per thousand per annum as against a
federal average of 10.3), and the highest illiteracy rate (41% as compared
with 20). Until recently they have been the most poorly treated of all the
populations inhabiting Yugoslavia, and their claim to unification, in a
Kosovar Republic, not to mention their unspoken urge for union with Albania,
threatens the vital interests of the Yugoslav state while conforming to the
very principles upon which it is based. [27]

Despite the success of the regime in industrialization and in raising living
standards, the Yugoslav economy remains fragile. If the nearly 400,000
migrant workers now employed in Western Europe are counted,
[28]
this country of 20 million people has nearly a million unemployed. Despite the
not inconsiderable gains in efficiency brought by marketization, Yugoslav
manufactures are still far from competitive in the free markets of the West
and, as long as this is so, the economy will remain critically dependent
upon Western subsidies. Such success as has been achieved would probably
have been impossible without the de facto hard currency subsidy
provided over many years by the United States. In any event, the size of the
Yugoslav market is such that, in the long run, and perhaps in the short,
only associate membership in the EEC, so as to draw Yugoslavia within the
tariff walls of the Common Market, would make it possible permanently to
stabilize the achievements of this friable system. Such membership, however,
appears out of the question in any

28. Of these 327,000 are employed in the Common Market
and, in turn, the overwhelming majority of these are at work in the Federal
Republic of Germany.

418

foreseeable future. Meantime, a major downturn in world trade could do
irreparable damage to the Federation.

The
arguments in support of the positive hypothesis must assuredly commence with
the proposition that, whatever the explanation — the multi-national
character of the interwar party, exclusion from the Cominform, the
leadership of Marshal Tito, U.S. subsidies — the Yugoslav experiment in
ethnic federalism has some remarkable achievements to its credit. The most
important of these is the ending of Serbian hegemony, originally
accomplished in the underground party during the interwar period and then
transposed to the state as a whole as a consequence of the party's accession
to power. [29] Serbian hegemony made interwar Yugoslavia
ungovernable. The opposition to Serb domination led to the breakdown of
parliamentary government, which produced the dictatorship of King Alexander
and led in turn to the assassination of the king. The Serbian hegemony
explains in some considerable part the indifferent behavior of the Croatian
elements in the royal army in 1941. But within the interwar state, as
distinct from the Party, Serbian hegemony was never broken.

Despite a century of struggle, the hegemonic organization of the Habsburg
monarchy (to which, in some ways, Yugoslavia is a successor) was never
overturned. The Magyars wrung equality from the dominant Germans only as a
consequence of the defeat of the Habsburg military in the Seven Weeks' War
of 1866. The constitutional expression of the new relationship was the dual
monarchy. But after 1867 the Germans and Magyars together resisted every
demand of the Slavic populations for a trial monarchy or some other form of
equal status ; as a consequence the two ruling peoples must bear major
responsibility for World War I. Indeed, 1914 began as a preventive war aimed
at destroying Serbia as a political entity, since the dissatisfaction of the
South Slavs in the dual monarchy with their status as second-class citizens
made of the Serbian kingdom a threat to the very existence of the monarchy.
The Serbian Black Hand chose Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a priority target,
precisely because the heir to the Habsburg throne was an advocate of
trialism. The leaders of the Black Hand feared that should Franz Ferdinand
succeed to the throne and initiate a trialistic experiment, the South Slavs
of the monarchy would lose interest in unification with Serbia. The hegemony
of the Austrians and Hungarians was ended only

29. The Serbs are still strongly overrepresented in the
Bosnian, Vojvodinian and Kossovar parties and in the Yugoslav officers'
corps. For party membership, see the 1958 figures given in Shoup, pp.
270-272.

419

with
the physical destruction of the Habsburg state, [30] just
as the Serbian hegemony in interwar Yugoslavia came to an end only with
occupation and partition by the Axis. Communist Yugoslavia, on the other
hand, has succeeded in working out a system of substantial equality among
its nations, as illustrated by the ethnic quota system now applied to
federal institutions, or by official recognition of three new Slavic
peoples.
[31] Communist Yugoslavia is thus free of the flaw which
proved fatal to both the Habsburg and the Karageorgević monarchy.

A
second achievement of Communist Yugoslavia is greatly improved treatment of
non-Slavic minorities. The neglect and even discrimination of the earlier
years has been replaced with a policy of encouraging non-Slavic cultures as
a means of improving relations with neighboring countries. This conception
of minorities as a bridge is new in the annals of Eastern Europe. Ethnic
Hungarians, whether inside or outside the homeland, readily admit that they
could wish for their minorities in Slovakia and Romania the same treatment
as that accorded the Magyars of the Vojvodina. [32] The
improvement of the situation of the Shiptar minority in the last three years
has been notable. Shiptar control of the police, the restoration of Albanian
national symbols, and the upgrading of the constitutional position of the
province have all contributed. The riots of the fall of 1968 were followed,
not by repression and increased control, but by concessions and ameliorative
measures. The situation along the Albanian frontier is now better than at
any time since 1948. In Yugoslavia, even the Gypsies have now formed an
association for the promotion of their interests, perhaps the first of its
kind in the history of the Romany in Eastern Europe. [33]
The change in minority policy is at least in part a reflection of the
leadership's thinking on the national problem. As long as they believed that
the Slavic peoples would merge into a single Yugoslav nation, whether as the
result of rapid economic development or of the maturation of Socialist
relations, then the minorities were of secondary importance. But once the
leadership had been forced to abandon the Yugoslav national idea, and accept
a multiplicity

31. The Montenegrins, the Macedonians and, most recently,
the Serbo-Croatian- speaking Moslems.

32. Cf. David Binder, "Hungarian Minority Tensions in
Slovakia Worry Budapest", The New York Times (23 June 1968), p. 17,
cols. 3-4.

33. "Yugoslav Gypsies Form Association To Press for Equal
Rights", The New York Times (27 April 1969), p. 12, cols. 1-5. The
Kutzo-Vlachs appear to be the only non-Slavic minority not to have an
organization of its own.

420

of
South Slav nations, there was virtue in extending the practice of equal
treatment to all populations, whether Slavic-speaking or not.

A
Yugoslav poll on the national question, perhaps the first public opinion
poll dealing with a vital issue to be undertaken by a Communist state, tends
to confirm the observations offered in the preceding paragraphs. Some 2500
respondents, chosen at random from all quarters of Yugoslavia, were asked in
1964 whether they considered relations between the peoples of the Federation
as good, satisfactory, or bad. If we lump together the 'good' and the
'satisfactory' responses of each national grouping, and place them in rank
order, we get the following table. [34]

Nation or Nationality

% of those asserting that relations among the peoples of
Yugoslavia were either good or satisfactory

Magyars

Macedonians

Moslems

Shiptars

Croats

Montenegrins

Slovenes

Serbs

93.2

88.6

86.7

80.5

79.1

78.9

78.9

77.7

The
reader will note first of all that the overwhelming majority of Yugoslav
citizens regard inter-ethnic relations as either good or satisfactory; the
median percentage is 80.5. He will further note that the two largest
non-Slavic minorities and the two newest of the three new nations find
themselves in the upper half of the listing, with the Magyars in the van and
the Shiptars, still under the rule of the Serbian security police, at the
time of the poll, at the median. Above all he will note that the Serbs, the
former master people, find themselves at the very bottom of the listing, a
function of resentment over loss of privilege.

It
seems reasonable to believe that ethnic multiplicity in itself played a
decisive role in what has turned out to be the rather extensive pluraliza-

34. Sergije Pegan, "Opinions on Relations Between the
Nations in Yugoslavia", in Firdus Dzinić (ed.), Yugoslav Public Opinion
Concerning Current Political and Social Questions (Belgrade, Institute
of Social Sciences, 1964; as translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Joint
Publications Research Service, Washington, D.C.), pp. 77-104. Except for the
Slovenes, the overwhelming majority of each group classified interethnic
relations as 'good'. In the Slovene case the percentages were 58.7 'good'
and 20.2 'satisfactory'. The 1964 Yugoslav poll appears to have been
executed with a methodological sophistication above the U.S. average. The
fact that a genuine poll could be undertaken is in itself evidence of the
pluralization of Yugoslav society.

421

tion
of Yugoslav society. In the long run the Slovenes and Croats refused to
continue the subsidization of the developing nations of the south. The
arguments between north and south on the issue of investment are reminiscent
of those between Soviet Russia and Communist China over the extent of Soviet
industrial assistance, or those between the USSR and Romania over the
industrial complex at Galaţi. The difference in outcome is to be explained
by the numerical (and other) weaknesses of the Yugoslav disputants, as well
as their inclusion within the framework of a single state, making it
possible, for example, for unemployed Macedonians to find work in Slovenian
factories. To get rid of central investment, the instrumentality by means of
which the north was brought to subsidize the south, it was necessary to
dismantle the central planning system and to marketize the economy, that is,
to let investment be determined by economic criteria. Synchronous with this
development, curiously enough, was the failure of the Party's effort to
indoctrinate the diverse Slavic populations with a Yugoslav national
consciousness, and the subsequent reversal of the process through which the
Party had acquired a Yugoslav outlook. Furthermore, in order to defeat the
Ranković faction, which became the defender of central planning and
investment, it was necessary to downgrade and de-Serbianize the security
police, set up constitutional courts, convert parliament into a national
forum, and so on. Thus it came to pass that Yugoslav federalism became
genuine, that instead of a monolithic political and economic power centered
in Belgrade there were various centers of power, six republics, two
autonomous provinces, the federal government, major enterprises, and so on.
Successful ethnic federalism may also help account for the generally
imaginative character of Yugoslav policy, with its workers' self-management,
joint enterprises, free ports, positive coexistence, non-aligned blocs, and
the like. In the Yugoslav case, in other words, ethnic multiplicity may now
have developed a positive feedback. Certainly, the outbursts of ethnic anger
which we hear, whether the Croatian denunciation of the language agreement
of Novi Sad (1967) or the Shiptar demonstrations in Kosovo and Macedonia
(1968), are probably best regarded as incidents in a set of on-the-whole
successful dialogues. Even the duplication of ports and industries, while
costly, is proof of the genuine character of Yugoslav federalism and, as
long as duplication does not lead to monopolistic practices, may be
considered a necessary price for the psychic security of the nations
involved.

Finally, in respect of the positive hypothesis, there is the fact that ethnic
equality gives each nation and nationality a stake in the preserva-

422

tion
of what has turned out to be a very successful political system. There can be
no doubt that Yugoslavia is one of the more successful Communist states,
whether we measure success by reference to the maintenance of national
independence, the impact on European and extra-European affairs, the
deepening of Socialist legality, or the advance of living standards.
Moreover, the nations and nationalities have also to keep in mind the
alternatives to the present Federation. If the Yugoslav market is
demonstrably too small for the current level of technology, and Yugoslavia
must seek integration in the world market, would a Slovenian market prove
notably superior in this respect? What kind of a Bosnian settlement might be
envisioned should Croatia and Serbia re-assume the status of sovereign and
independent states? Would the Magyar minority really prefer incorporation
into Hungary in the present circumstances?

The
proof of the pudding is in the eating. During the three-month period of the
Czechoslovak crisis, that is, during July, August, and September 1968, some
69,261 new members joined the CPY, or three times more than had joined
during the first six months of 1968. In the Republic of Serbia, 32,141 or
84% of those joining were under 25 years of age. This is to be compared to
the 23,234 youngsters who joined the Party in all the republics throughout
the whole of 1967, or with the drop between 1961 and 1966 in the total
number of Party members under 25 from 244,077 or 21.6% of the membership to
120,234 or 11.5%. In other words, the Party underwent a rejuvenation as a
consequence of the new threat to the Federation. (In the critical year of
1948 there were 197,791 admissions, or six times as many as in 1947.)
[35] In this connection, it is remarkable that the Soviet occupation of
Czechoslovakia caused Tirana momentarily to cease its attacks on Belgrade
and to declare that, in the event of a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia, the
Albanian army would fight alongside the Yugoslav.

To
the present writer the arguments which support the positive hypothesis seem
clearly to outweigh those buttressing its negative counterpart. Barring such
a catastrophe as a major economic depression in the West, the Yugoslav
Federation appears to have achieved a workable solution of the national
question. To grasp the full significance of any such assertion it might be
useful to think of the SFRJ as an East European analogue of the EEC, that
is, as a new, multinational state structure still

in
process of evolution — in the case of the EEC from the bottom up, I in the
case of the SFRJ from the top down. In neither case are the individual
nations treated as archaisms to be replaced in stages by a new and more
inclusive supranationalism. Rather, the existing nations with their
distinctive cultures are taken as given and are being integrated into a
federal or even confederal community (as a consequence, it is true, of
pressing economic and, in the last analysis, military need). Certainly, a
new and additional loyalty is emerging, but it is not national in character.
Rather, it is loyalty to an abstract principle, in the one instance to a
European conception, in the other to a Socialist dream. [36]
To formulate the same proposition in more immediate terms, there is, on the
basis of I this reading of the evidence, no reason to expect that Tito's
departure will create an unmanageable or even a disorganizing succession
crisis. As an historic personage, the Marshal is irreplaceable, but as the
symbol I and the arbiter of ethnic equality his going will rather mean that
some institutional substitute will have to be worked out. Perhaps in forming
the new, ethnic-parity executive committee, the Marshal had, among others,
the succession problem in mind.

36. See the argumentation of Tito on this point as
presented by Hondius, p. 243.